Customer profiling for lawn care

Profiling Green Industry Customers Part 2

If you missed Profiling Green Industry Customers Part 1 check it out here. 

Now that you understand how to figure out the exact demographics by utilizing the Alexa.com tool, the Facebook ads audience insights tool, Look for a magazine for your particular niche. With magazines, they always have what we call media kits.

Media Kits for More Customer Research

 Within the media kit itself, it will tell you the exact demographic. You might get some data from these media kits that you might not get from these other tools. And that's why we're using this route in addition to everything else. Finding a media kit is fairly easy to do.

Go to google.com and you want to type in the niche. So in this case, it is lawn care or weed control or weed control my city. And after that, you type in the word magazine and then you type in mediakit. Obviously, you want to make sure that you visit the site and make sure that the magazine fits your products and services.

Let’s say your ideal customers like to read Fine Garden so we go to Fine Garden Media Kits. And if we go to click on images here, we can see what the magazines look like so we have a better idea of what we're dealing with.

So, for example, if we were to click on Better Homes and Gardens, it's not directly related, but we can see that it is somewhat related, but this gives us a better idea.

So just by going through here and finding your perfect buyer and who they are, you can figure out other things as well. We got Better Homes and Gardens Media Kits, Organic gardening media kits. Basically, a media kit for a magazine is a page that tells you how much it costs to advertise on their magazine.

More Demographics

But besides that, it'll also tell you the demographics as well. Age, income, spending, and more. They are married. They own a home. Graduate college. And they have children under the age of 18 or their children are parents.

Their average amount spent per year on gardening and related activities. They're willing to spend up to about $935. Also gives you great ideas for website articles that will bring eyes to your website.

Sometimes if you go to the main website and you scroll all the way down and you see like a button that says like advertise or anything like that, you'll be able to get the media kits from there.

Now that you have this detailed information about what your customers probably look like, we can move on to their typical day.

Outlining a Typical Day of Your Ideal Customer

In this particular section, I'm going to show you how to map out a typical day of your perfect buyer. The reason why you want to do this is because you'll get a better perspective of what they are dealing with from day to day, what frustrations they're dealing with, what gets them excited, what gets them mad, what gets them sad, and everything in between.

One of the best ways of doing this is simply really get yourself in the person's shoes. Now, like I said earlier, this is actually harder than it sounds. So the best way of doing this is by going to Google and typing out something like this.

Lets say for example we use “homeowner lawn care”  and then I'm going to write the words, 2 words, typical day.

Now, there's no guarantee you're not going to always 100% get this, but the nice thing is you're going to be able to see things like YouTube videos and other sorts of media, which we'll talk about in the video after this one.

But this will allow you to get into the shoes of someone who is a hyper responsive buyer and perfect buyer in these niches. So another thing is Homeowners journals. Looking at their day-to-day journals, if they have any. Anywhere they talk about their day.

Obviously, an easier way of doing this is to go on their Facebook page and maybe follow a person and see, what they are saying. By doing this process, it's going to really help you out as far as figuring out what potential products and services they will want to buy. Obviously, different people are going to be different so it's not really a 100% one size fits all. But if you talk to a perfect buyer you will get a better sense of what they are dealing with.

But in this specific method I would just spend about 15 to half an hour to try to map this out. A Day in the Life of a homeowner.  They may not say anything about when they are mowing or taking care of their lawn, but you never know. If might be easier to just interview some friends or neighbors and ask them about their day. Ask them about how much time they spend on their lawn and landscape.  

Putting It All Together

There's no right or wrong answer right now. Putting together what you know, write out what you think your typical customers looks like.

Female, married, 2 kids that are in busy activities.  Two dogs. Likes to have friends over and cooks outside on the grill regularly. In the morning she does this, her husband is busy doing that.  Add as much detail as you can. Map out from the time they get up to the time they go to bed. This helps you greatly because it tells you exactly, you know, what their frustrations are. Next, I'm going to show you how to do media mapping. This will help you get a better perspective of what they like to watch, what they like, what drives them, what's their motivations. Then we're taking things a step further.

Media Mapping Customers

The reason we call it media mapping is because we are going to put ourselves in the person's shoes. We do this by utilizing media sites such as youtube.com and or other sites as well. And this is going to allow us to map out a better view of what our perfect buyer is into.

What their perspective is, basically map out their passion about their niche. What they like, what they dislike, what do they watch, what they like to learn, and everything surrounding their lawn and landscape interests. We can type in Google and YouTube, homeowner lawn care and see what we get.

Sort videos by view count and rating. So we can see view count here. And we can see that the ones on the top are obviously higher highly viewed. Let's see. Dallas Garden Girl TV, 298,000. So this is if you click on this just to take a look, so it looks like pretty much fits that demographic of female, maybe middle aged female.

Take a look at the comments that matched that particular video to see and get an idea of what people are saying about that particular video.

Look for patterns or similarities in what people are saying. If somebody is saying repeatedly that their frustration is this or they are passionate about a consistent thing repeatedly, then that tells me that there's something there.

So that's the whole goal of this. So we can type in landscape or gardening type tv shows, we can type in garden documentary. And, obviously, look at the video to make sure that it is related to what we are selling. So gardener, maybe gardening. So try different variations.

And eventually, after you watch all these videos, you'll just start to see the pains that homeowners go through, what gets them excited, what gets them angry, what gets them mad. And, eventually, you'll know a lot about your business niche just by watching these videos.

Other Media Sites

You can use other social networking sites such as Instagram To get a better view of the pictures out there, look at Pinterest to see what people are doing in in terms of lawn care goes. Different media, pictures, videos, text even podcasts.

Keep a list of the likes, the dislikes, everything that you can think of that would allow you to map out what is going on in your perfect buyer's mind. So that's really what we're trying to do is essentially map out what is going on in their brain. The better that you understand them, the better you're going to know when you start to sell your services.

You'll already be leaps and bounds ahead of most of your competitors at this point because most of your competitors are not even thinking about doing any of this.

This will reveal to you what they're willing to buy and what they're willing to spend. Also, what extras they will spend more money for so that you have a better picture of what services you could offer.

Determining Buying Habits 

To conclude this guide, we are going to talk about homeowners buying habits. Why they buy, what do they buy, and things related. We will be visiting 2 different websites.

We're going to be utilizing the Facebook ads audience insights tool. And we're going to be using amazon.com. Amazon's going to reveal to us a lot of good data as far as buying habits. Facebook will show much they spend, which is something that is not provided by a lot of tools.

How to Use This Information

So this information is golden. You are homing in on your perfect buyer. I am totally ignoring everybody else. Now, you might be thinking, well, won't I be losing sales? Yeah. You might lose a few sales, but if you market to primarily to the extremely interactive, engaging audience, you'll be able to speak to everybody else.

These people are more likely to buy from you anyway. Neighbors tend to have a lot in common so you will be targeting a larger number than it seems. Facebook Ad Audience Insights begins to show you the lifestyle pertaining just to the specific gender and age bracket you have determined is your prime lawn or landscape customer.

Paint the Whole Picture As Much As Possible

Examples would be household size, home market value, how much is their home valued at? So we can see that their home is valued about 200,000 to 700,000, so kind of upper middle class section. And spending methods, they use any card, bank card, travel and entertainment, gas store.

So if you look at this picture here, it tells us they do have credit cards. They don't spend a lot on travel and entertainment. They do spend money on gas, which we all do.  

Purchase behavior. What are they purchasing? This is going to reveal to you a lot of information. Business purchases, obviously, are not a lot. Household products, pet products, health and beauty, home and garden, food and drink. And so you can see that they spent a lot of money on pet products.

So now that you have mapped out their typical day, you can also get an idea of what other different services you can sell to them, not just within that particular lawn care niche, but other niches as well. Dog fence, deer control, mosquito control, irrigation.  You might be surprised at what they are paying for already.

We can actually see what vehicles they purchased. Tells us more about their personalities and lifestyle.

Now we can go over to Amazon and we can type in something like weed control products.

Sort by average customer review. The more customer reviews the better so this will tell us what exactly are they spending their money on. So, we can see weed control that kills all types of weeds. They also want it to have fertilizer included.

They want easy and fast.  In terms of Green Industry services, they want as many services done for them as they can afford.  They don't want to spend the time doing everything themselves. They want something that works without any lawn care knowledge. Now, look at price points. Do they spend a lot of money on low ticket items? Or do they spend a lot of money on high ticket items? How does that compare to your services? It may not be specific to where you live, but is should be pretty generic and close enough.

Amazon will give you categories within the main category so that you can break things down for a better view. If we do average customer review, this allows us to see what is being bought the most.

Look For Patterns

Look for patterns because patterns generally tell you that there's something consistent. And if there's something that is consistent then that tells me that it might be worth looking into. Make sure that you go step by step and implement the whole process so that you can find your perfect buyer.

Use current customers as profiles also. If over 30% of your customers seem to be older and retired you are on to something.

Use this customer profiling when setting up all your marketing. Use it to plan service offerings, customer services, and any other customer interactions. Profiling lawn and landscape customers can be the key to success and higher profits.

If you missed Profiling Green industry Customers Part 1 check it out here. 

August 20, 2024

Lawn Renovation – Getting Started

August 17, 2024

Choosing the Right Turfgrass

Join Our Lawn Care Business Managers
Mailing List

Sign Up to receive product updates and special offers from our team. We have a lot of great free tools to share with you.